Aftershocks by Harry Turtledove

woman, and found ideology about as important as food. Liu Han shook her head, somewhere between bewilderment and pride. When she was Liu Mei’s age, she’d hardly had an ideology. She’d been an ignorant, illiterate peasant. Thanks to the Party, she was neither ignorant nor illiterate anymore, and her daughter never had been.
    With more jounces, the mechanized combat vehicle went off the road and into a grove of willows. There, with newly green boughs screening off the outside world, it came to a stop, though the motor kept running. A rattle at the back of the vehicle was a male undoing whatever fastening had kept the rear gate closed. It swung open. In the language of the Race, the scaly devil said, “You Tosevites, you come out now.”
    If they didn’t come out now, the little devils could shoot them while they were in the troop-carrying compartment. Liu Han saw she had no choice. Out she came, bumping her head on the roof of the vehicle.
    She looked around as soon as she had her feet on the ground. The turret of the combat vehicle mounted a small cannon and a machine gun. Those bore on the Chinese men with submachine guns and rifles who advanced toward the machine. In their midst were three woebegone little scaly devils. One of the Chinese called, “You are Nieh Ho-T’ing, Liu Han, and Liu Mei?”
    “That’s right,” Liu Han said, her agreement mixing with those of the others. She added, “Who are you?”
    “That doesn’t matter,” the man answered. “What does matter is that you are the people for whom we are exchanging these hostages.” He swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the unhappy little devils he and his comrades were guarding.
    Negotiations between the men of the People’s Liberation Army—for that was what they had to be—and the little scaly devils who made up the crew of the combat vehicle did not last long. When they were through, the little scaly devils in Chinese hands hurried into the vehicle while Liu Han and her daughter and Nieh hurried away from it. The scaly devils slammed the doors to the troop compartment shut as if they expected the Chinese to start shooting any second.
    And the Chinese leader said, “Hurry. We have to get out of here. We can’t be sure the little scaly devils don’t have an ambush laid on.”
    Fleeing through the willow branches that kept throwing little leaves in her face, Liu Han said, “Thank you so much for freeing us from that camp.”
    “You are experienced revolutionaries,” the People’s Liberation Army man answered. “The movement needs you.”
    “We will give it everything we have,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “The Kuomintang could not defeat us. The Japanese could not defeat us. And the little scaly devils shall not defeat us, either. The dialectic is on our side.”
    The little scaly devils knew nothing of the dialectic. But they, like the Party, took a long view of history. Eventually, history would show which was correct. Liu Han remained convinced the proletarian revolution would triumph, but she was much less certain than she had been that it would happen in her lifetime.
But I’m back in the struggle,
she thought, and hurried on through the willows.
     
    Not even during the fighting after the conquest fleet landed on Tosev 3 had Gorppet seen such devastation as he found when the small unit he commanded moved into the Greater German
Reich.
    One of the males in the unit, a trooper named Yarssev, summed up his feelings when he asked, “How did the Big Uglies stay in the war so long when we did this to them? Why were they so stupid?”
    “I cannot answer that,” Gorppet said. “All I know is, they fought hard up till the moment they surrendered.”
    “Truth, superior sir,” Yarssev agreed. “And now their countryside will glow in the dark for years because of their foolish courage.”
    He was exaggerating, but not by any tremendous amount. Every male moving into the
Reich
wore a radiation-exposure badge on a chain around his